Pioniere della Musica elettronica in Italia

Category: women and music

“Pioneer Spirits: New media representations of women in electronic music history”. A great article by Frances Morgan in the current issue of Organised Sound, Vol. 22, Issue 2 (Alternative Histories of Electroacoustic Music) August 2017, pp. 238-249. Teresa Rampazzi is numbered amongst those composers previously “either ignored or thought to be marginal […]. Some media representations of the female electronic musician raise concerns for feminist scholars of electronic music history. Following the work of Tara Rodgers, Sally MacArthur and others, [Frances Morgan considers] some new media representations of electronic music’s female ‘pioneers’, situate them in relation to both feminist musicology and media studies, and propose readings from digital humanities that might be used to examine and critique them”.

Frances Morgan is Deputy Editor of The Wire, former editor of plan b magazine, writes the Soundings column for Sight & Sound and is a regular contributor to this publication and to Electric Sheep. A member of the Wire Soundsystem, she will DJ the very wide selection of exclusive material, past, present and future.

Who were the female pioneers of electronic music? Bettina Wackernagel, curator of the sold-out Heroines of Sound Festival in Berlin, explains all to Culture.pl’s Filip Lech. A great interview in which mention is made of #TeresaRampazzi and the research project by Laura Zattra. Thanks Bettina Wackernagel!

She was not a feminist and she did not recriminate sexual differences in the artistic world. She once said: “just as there are many women who have a demanding profession, the same is true in music […]. Unwittingly I risked compromising my musical interests when I got married. But they were much too important for me” [Teresa Rampazzi in interview with Luisa Galanti: L. Galanti, L’altra metà del rigo. La donna e la composizione femminile oggi in Italia, Imola,Grafiche Galeati, 1983, p.66].

If someone asked her if there is a feminine way to make music, she answered: “absolutely not. There is neither male nor female music. There are pieces composed by men which seem to be composed by a woman and viceversa, if by ‘feminine’ you think of something sweet, elegant, delicate. But a woman can be as vigorous as a man, or even more!” (Ivi, p. 72).